Re: very small packages - merge into general/miscelleneous or move into core

[Carnë Draug]

On 17 January 2014 12:30, c. <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 17 Jan 2014, at 13:18, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> No.
>
> Then I don't understand why ...

Because we are not talking about such packages.

The strings package is unmaintained, is shadowing a core function
(strjoin) and needs a new release. The same happened when 3.6.0 was
released (shadowing strtrim). Looking at the logs, the last release
also had a fix because the swap function no longer existed in the
control package.

The physical constants package was unmaintained and out of date using
the constants as defined in 2002. The script to fetch the up to date
constant values had stopped working because the website had change the
format of the table. Hopefully that would not happen again, but hey!
It shouldn't have happened in the first place anyway and it did.

The time package was merged into financial because it didn't had a
maintainer and its functions actually belong to the financial toolbox
in Matlab.

The combinatorics package was unmaintained. It was not causing any
problems, yet. But as I mentioned before, it's easier to fix small
things as Octave changes, than to fix it 7 years later when the
required changes are many. Like what is happening with the strings
package. Preparing a release takes time, but it does not matter if it
has 3 or 30 functions. Replace swap with deal, and remove strjoin and
strtrim when they were added to octave core hardly counts as a burden.

The only package that is being maintained is struct. I'm suggesting
moving some of its functionalities to other places and its maintainer
already replied to it so that's the end of it.

Carnë